The web is dead. Who cares?

By Denny Carter

August 20th, 2010

No doubt many netizens of cyberspace were surprised to hear this week that the World Wide Web is on death’s doorstep while the internet is alive and well and ready to be the platform for an electronic Camelot, PC World reports. That’s because for many folks the web and the net are synonymous. They use the words interchangeably in their daily lives, and they’re likely to continue using them that way even if the prediction of the web’s fade from glory becomes a reality. Let’s face it, all this talk of the web’s rapidly diminishing importance is simply “inside baseball” palaver for many cybernauts who just want to get things done and don’t care about what enables them to do it. To them, it doesn’t matter that what they see in their browsers represents less than a quarter of the traffic on the internet and is shrinking, or that most of the traffic is consumed by peer-to-peer file transfers, eMail (90 percent of which is spam), corporate virtual private network traffic, machine-to-machine APIs, Skype calls, interactive online games, Xbox Live players, iTunes users, voice over IP phone calls, chatting, Netflix streaming movies, and so on…

Denny Carter

Dennis has covered higher education technology since April 2008, having interviewed some of the most recognized IT pros in U.S. colleges and universities. He is always updating eCampus News with the latest in pressing ed-tech issues, such as the growing i